


in the shadow of your heart

by ahana



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon Compliant, F/F, Soulmate AU, TOGFemSlashFortnight, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27119257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahana/pseuds/ahana
Summary: Quỳnh lingers in shades of red. Andy sees the world in harsh flashes.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 18
Kudos: 41
Collections: The Old Guard Femslash Fortnight 2020





	in the shadow of your heart

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this [ incredible fic/drabble.](https://theoldkenzari.tumblr.com/post/630991560402681856/hmmm-ok-joenicky-colour) _“- you see the world in black and white until the day you touch your soulmate. when they die, you lose the colour they brought to your life -”_
> 
> Kinda consistent with Force Multiplied? I mean… you could bend the timeline a little bit and it could fit.

When she died for the first time, she died in gray.

The horse she fell off was a dark gray, the blood seeping through her clothes was a darker gray, and the field she laid on was the darkest of grays.

She doesn’t remember much about her first death — another battlefield and another gruesome fall, she would tell Nile — but she can still feel the ripples of longing in her chest for the universe of color that she had thought she would never get to see. 

For hundreds of years, she wandered alone in monochrome, jumping from tribes to settlements. She fought battles beside the people who housed her and killed those who wronged her. She lingered in some places, learning their ways of life and growing under their care, and other times, she breezed through towns with a single-minded focus. 

The one thing she avoided were the soulmate celebrations. Every culture had its own version of them — lanterns lit up whole towns, flowers decorated thresholds and elaborate dances were dedicated to various bonding gods. They also had their own backstories. Some called it the gods’ blessing on humanity and others looked at it as merely another miracle of nature. 

In the fields, around bonfires, or sitting next to pots of food made to wish the happy couple joy, she found her insides aching. Not physically. It had been quite too long since she remembered what pain that lasted beyond a few minutes felt like. But weariness settled deep inside her and haunted the sinew and bones that held her together.

Whenever she felt it, in the empty space where her thirst for a good fight ought to rest, she knew she had to move. 

Her purpose, she used to believe, to whatever effect, was to walk the lands alone. The curse of immortality presumably came with the curse of being alone as well. She knew old ladies who could get her better deals than that at the local markets.

She never had a clue as to whether she was atoning for some wrongdoing or if a god she didn’t know she served was acting through her. But, before the sun woke once again from its slumber, she had to leave another town in stealth. 

With her labrys in one hand and a bag over her shoulder, she ran from peace and into another fight. Alone, charging toward the enemy in a valley or organizing a stealth attack among the busy streets of a coastal town, she watched more people find their soulmates.

It always started with a gasp, a loud one usually, as they realized that their whole world had changed. Some people jumped to find their soulmates while others just turned in circles to look at their surroundings in color.

She never let herself linger on the questions she was dying to ask about herself, but she couldn’t help but wonder what she would do. 

And, then, 976 years into her solitude, she began dreaming. 

On a warm night, somewhere in the plains of northern Mesopotamia, Andromache — a name she was slowly growing fond of, given to her by the Scythians — went to sleep and dreamt of a soft face lying on a river bank in all gray. Dark hair spilled out of a coiffed bun and lay across the wet, monotone earth. Battle cries and ferocious shouts of pain echoed in the background but Andromache’s dream danced around the woman as countless warriors protected her fallen body. Swords clanged in gray, under a white sky, and black skirts raced across an open field. 

Then, suddenly, a splash of something caught her eye. Right next to the woman’s cheek was liquid like blood, but in a design Andromache had never seen before. It ran from her forehead and pooled between her cheek and the soil. 

Red, she found out from the old physician in town, was the color of blood. 

_Red._

Meeting Quỳnh in the arid Karakum desert of Central Asia, nearly a century after the dreams began, was a quest that tested everything Andromache had. She remembered agonizing for months about what the dreams could mean as she obstinately made her way East. 

Quỳnh moved fast after the death of her family. She was running toward something and a voice inside Andromache wanted to believe she was dreaming of her, too. 

The black and white of her own world never changed, but every night, in her dreams, she saw shades of red in the soil underneath her feet slashes of crimson across men’s shirts, or the deep maroons of Quỳnh’s dress. 

When they finally met, Andromache was forced to believe in fate.

In a large desert, spreading across thousands of kilometres, she somehow managed to find a ragged and dehydrated Quỳnh. After a harrowing journey and an encounter with ruthless ruffians that were just the icing on the cake atop her decades of isolation, Quỳnh had nearly given up. 

Andromache learned that the dreams had meant something different to Quỳnh — a sign of death.

And Quỳnh didn’t want to die.

She was the only one of them who ever saw their immortality as a blessing — a chance to deliver justice and create history. Andromache had never met anyone who so desperately wanted to make their lives mean something. Quỳnh believed in fate. She taught Nicolò to see the intricate weave of nature, to accept the ways of the universe. Quỳnh thought that their own meeting as well as the dreams that led them to Lykon, Yusuf and Nicolò, was destiny choosing them for a cause bigger than them. 

Back in the heat of the desert, bent over Andromache as she drank from one of the flasks around Andromache’s neck, their eyes met. 

Andromache’s first colorsighting was the browns of Quỳnh’s eyes. Under the hot sun, in the blink of an eye, Andromache saw the earthy tones of every land she would walk with Quỳnh in those eyes.

She reached out to run a hand over Quỳnh’s hair as she gulped the water down. The hues in her cheeks, colors Andromache didn’t know the name of, were quickly fading to white and her eyes were fluttering shut. The barren land around them, cracked clay and desert plants combined, was in vivid color but all she could look at was Quỳnh’s soft, pale skin and her chapped, pink lips. 

They saw the hues of the universe together. They learned of every color that could exist and kept track of their favorite ones on cave walls. Walked to the hazy ends of it, as it plummeted downward from the edge of a cliff into turquoise water. They saw yellow canaries zip by them in lush forests, a million shades of green coexisting in a single mile. Fighting thousands of battles side-by-side, Andromache saw the stony glint of an arrowhead, the crimson river of blood and the paleness of life leaving a body. They painted in gold, laughed in the white of snow and walked under cerise sunsets.

Quỳnh taught her the names of the colors in her tongue and made up names for new shades. Andromache swallowed every word, every sound. 

Quỳnh was the warmest orange embers on a hearth, the brightest red of vermillion filled baskets, and the softest blush of wind flowers that dotted the meadows in the spring. 

Her eyes held the fire of their lives, lighting their way to the right battles and keeping them safe under the stars.

She was Andromache’s blood, her heart, her rufescent soul that persisted through every new life. 

Quỳnh was red. 

\\\\\

An hour after the throng of priests and townsfolk swallowed Quỳnh into their mix and dragged her into an iron coffin, the world wrenched itself away from color and drowned in gray. 

Anne — slumped down to the floor, wrists dripping blood onto the metal shackles that held her prisoner — had screamed herself hoarse. She was bent over her body, head bowed into her chest as she subconsciously continued to pull at the shackles.

After watching Quỳnh struggle in her captors’ arms, Anne tried everything in her power to break free of the chains.

She moved her head from side to side like a feral animal, screaming curses at the locked door and vowing revenge. Rage coursed through her bloodstreams and desperation clawed at her chest, ripping her skin apart to expose the hollow center of her chest where her heart used to be. 

An iron coffin. There were only two possibilities from there: Buried alive to succumb to the weight of the ground or pushed into the sea to drown infinitely. 

Her first death without Quỳnh by her side was cold.

The world around her, hoary and ashy, blurred and spun in circles. Her body shivered from head to toe. She couldn’t push herself into a sitting position. Her forehead hit the stone tiles. Her head rolled to the left and her body followed. Quỳnh’s voice, yelling Anne’s name, echoed in the walls. She was cold, numb. All bone, no skin. As her eyelids drew close, in the spots dancing in front of her face, she saw Quỳnh’s red lips stretched into a soft smile hovering over her with the starry sky as her backdrop.

When she awoke to clamoring outside her cell, it didn’t even take her a second to remember the events that had transpired. 

And then, out of the corner of her eye, Anne saw crimson stains on the stone floor. 

Her eyes shot open.

The world was in color again. Beige walls, black metal, yellow flames and red bruises.

And then it wasn’t. Gray tiles, gray door, gray bone healing itself.

And then, color. Once again. White smock, brown dirt, brown and black blended in the strands of her hair.. 

Anne’s head spun.

The world blinked in and out of color, becoming fuzzier on the edges before gasping into well-defined hues. On and on. Repeatedly. 

Initial confusion was replaced by a clear cut realization: Over and over again, with every switch of Anne’s vision, Quỳnh’s body healed while her lungs continued to fill with water. She died and arose. And every time, a little less of her came back. 

They looked for Quỳnh together for decades.

Joseph and Nicholas found her in England after she escaped by some combination of miracles. They questioned townspeople for her while she harassed every worker on the docks. They freed other so-called heretics, Anne with a particular vengeance that she knew was a cause of worry for her brothers. They combed the width of the ocean until water swam in front of their eyes even in their dreams. 

Her vision continued to swing between monochrome and vivid color in a frenzy. She developed headaches because of the switches. They were cured just as easily and quickly as they came, so it was more like a permanent throbbing in the front of her head, just above her right brow. A reminder of who she had lost.

The headache was nothing compared to the hollowness in her chest. An elephant trampled across her body every minute, pushing her chest into itself. A cavity formed deep in her body. She couldn’t sleep unless she passed out from exhaustion or injury. She couldn’t eat anything or drink anything. Her body was numb more often than not, and Quỳnh’s name ran endlessly from her lips like an ancient chant. 

Decades after all their connections to Quỳnh’s fate die, she refused to give up. On another ship at yet another time out at sea, they got caught in a dangerous storm. The pirates ran up and down trying to secure the sails, protect the masts and keep the vessel afloat. They tied themselves to parts of the ship and whispered prayers underneath their breath.

Anne wanted to rip the sky in half.

For years, her Quỳnh suffered as water gushed into her body and sucked her life out of her, before their common fate brought her back to relive her curse. Was Quỳnh seeing the ocean in blue or in gray? Did she even dare to open her eyes?

Convinced by the look in Joseph and Nicholas’s eyes that said this would be the last time they would let her pursue her ineffectual search, Anne made the choice to dive into the ocean. If she couldn’t save her love, then she would suffer with her instead. 

_Quỳnh would know,_ she had thought. _She always did_.

The water — colder than ice, harder than rock and crueler than the gods — pulled Anne into itself. 

As her body got tossed around like a ragdoll in a sea of blue and gray, her limbs were stretched and flung out of her control.

If Andy closed her eyes now, she could still feel the phantom pull of the ocean as it dragged her down. 

_Bring me to_ _Quỳnh_ , she remembered asking the waves. _Take me to my love and let me rest my head on her chest. I wish for nothing more, if you will not give me it, and I wish for nothing less._

The waves answered her with a loud crash. Turbulent currents forced her to swallow water. A cerulean goodbye.

Looking back, she should have known it wasn’t meant to be. Her lives were, after all, fated to begin and end in red.

She remembered the world slowly going to black before she felt arms around her waist, pulling her up. Nicholas swam for the both of them, kicking desperately against the oldest force in the world — the one who had claimed her love. He kicked with a fervour that jumpstarted her own consciousness. She could pinpoint the moment she knew they were not going to make it with his legs alone. 

The truth of the matter lied in the silent promises she made to Nicolò and Yusuf as they slept beside her in a crooked tent in some town in eastern Europe centuries ago: They lived for the other and she would never let them be apart. 

Under the roar of the ocean, she knew she couldn’t let Nicholas drown with her.

She would never subject Joseph to the same fate she had been condemned to. She would never let him wander the seas, searching for his colors as his paintings slipped into a hysterical blend of yellows and grays, greens and grays, blues and grays. 

She helped Nicholas to the surface, dying at least thrice before they got there. But, as she swam, she never stopped chanting Quỳnh’s name.

\\\\\

Five months into Booker’s exile, Andy approved a job in India. Copley’s contact, based in Guwahati, described a situation with a network of corrupt politicians that required “a unique skill set.” They were at the edge of a small town in Assam, waiting for intel from a local source. Andy was still suspicious of Copley — Joe and Nicky even more so — but Nile was insistent on this one. She was young but she wasn’t dumb, so they let her take the lead.

It had been a rainy week. The forest around them glistened with rain droplets. Every color felt too delicate to touch in the few seconds Andy could see it. Viridescent bushes surrounded the abandoned three-roomed house they’d been squatting in for the week. It was a dusty little thing. Empty shelves ran along every wall, the kitchen was bigger than Andy needed it to be, and there was a little nook that Joe had claimed as his little painting area. 

Nile fell in love with it. Andy had seen her run her hands along the outside of the house. She spent hours of the other day on the terrace on her back watching the blinding yellow sun make its way across the sky. Even though they were on a mission, this was Nile’s reprieve from the five-months-long training sessions she’d been getting.

Andy couldn’t begrudge her for feeling a little lazy. There were always a few years here and there where the world seemed to slow down for her too. Besides, Boo- Andy had heard that time moved faster for the young ones. 

At the moment, she and Nicky were the only ones in the house. Since Joe blended in with the locals more than the others, he was in charge of getting their groceries and meeting with their source in town. Nile had gone exploring in the forest behind them, murmuring about surveying property before deciding to live in it. Nicky was asleep inside, a large book resting on his chest, and Andy… well, Andy would rather fight a lion and bear the regrowing of two limbs than admit it but, Andy was feeling lost. Very lost.

She could die now. She could hurt and she could bruise, and those reminders would _stay_ on her flesh.

After Merrick, she watched garish marks form on her skin with morbid fascination. Most nights, her body hurt all over. Her left leg felt like it was being pulled in a hundred different directions, making it impossible to sleep or lie awake without screaming through clenched teeth.

Nile had had to become a quick expert in physical therapy. She and Nicky divided their care for Andy’s health in ways only they would understand.

Andy looked at the _modar_ _phool_ tree hanging over the verandah as she patiently oiled her _kiem_. She wiped the oil on the blade with a piece of cloth, the monotonous motion soothing her jittery bones. 

The first time she’d held the _kiem_ , she’d been fighting alongside Quỳnh. Maybe a thousand years ago? Maybe two? A battle or an invasion of some sorts. 

It was all quite hazy for Andy, and lately it was like she couldn’t even remember approximate centuries or locations. Her own history was disappearing in front of her eyes. She wondered if that was a side effect of mortality, and then remembered Copley’s intricate web strung with red thread. 

She made a note to tell him about this particular battle.

_Probably pirates,_ she thought. Invaders. She and Quỳnh were trying to save the women and children but they were outnumbered. They got roped into a battle a while later. 

Two hours into it, she had turned around to scope out Quỳnh’s position on the field, as she always did. Andromache had preferred keeping her in her periphery but they both had a tendency to get swept up in the rush of a fight. Just as her eyes found Quỳnh’s — she was standing several paces away — a sword ran itself through Quỳnh’s heart. 

It was a clean stab, in and out. Quỳnh’s face molded itself into a look of shock, her body frozen in action. 

Andromache had rushed to her side, slashing and maiming anyone in her path. When she‘d reached her beloved, she rushed to her knees, waiting for her to open her eyes. 

Quỳnh’s _kiem_ had fallen next to her and Andromache grabbed it in time to kill a man rushing at her throat. Then, she had stood over Quỳnh’s fallen body, defending her love with her sword. The weight had been unfamiliar in her hands. Andy had never held it before, respectful of the importance of Quỳnh’s father’s gift to his only daughter.

When Quỳnh awoke, she had refused to take the sword back. Instead, she had pushed it into Andromache’s hands, nocked an arrow in her own crossbow, and shot another man aiming for Andy’s throat. 

After, the sword became Andy’s. It had been her vow to Quỳnh.

A large gray cloud made its way slowly across the sky. Andy sighed and flipped the sword in her hands. 

Her fingers caressed the engraved vow on the hilt of the sword. _PROTECT MY HEART_. 

The blade caught the white sunlight and released it in a blink of pale yellow.

Andy had adjusted to her world torturously blinking in and out of color. With five hundred years of practice, the headache on the right side of her head is something she only acknowledged in the quiet of wintery nights. But Andy knew. With every switch, Andy knew that her love was dying another death. 

The switches came much faster now. She could no longer remember what still colors looked like. Instead, the horrors of flashes and colors being warped into messy shapes were all she had. In the first hundred years or so, Andy tried to keep track of Quỳnh’s deaths. Her number had reached the millions before she had begun to lose count.

She never gave up. Every year, she went back out to the ocean to look for her soul. Still aquamarine waters, murky ripples or icy waves couldn’t keep her away. She learned everything there was to learn about the ocean and drowning (far away from Joe and Nicky’s eyes, of course; they knew she had never given up but they didn’t need to know anything else). 

While she cleaned her weapons, she thought about the ache in her leg, Nile’s ongoing lessons, and their strategy for sneaking into the compound tonight. At the back of her mind, a small voice murmured Quỳnh’s name on a loop. 

Above her, the bright gray flowers, splitting like a claw, dangled in the wind and provided little cover from the white sunlight. 

In the next instant, a searing pain ran through Andy’s head. 

The world kicked to color so vivid, she felt blinded by the orange above her and the green underneath her. The pink of the room to her left glared at her. The canopy of trees was as bright as an emerald. She could pick out every individual speck of dirt, each shade of brown and tan and umber. Her eyes twitched. She turned her face to the sun and spotted a halo around it.

_Indrapaksha_ , a voice from the back of her head whispered, _that’s what it was called when you last saw it._ Each ring was crystal clear. Each of the seven colors, too intense. Too clear. 

Andy clutched her head tightly and sank to the ground on her knees. The pain felt like a thousand needles twisting their way into her skull. She had seen color before. She could recognize each shade in a millisecond. But this… this was new. 

The pain and the colors stayed for a few overwhelming minutes. The tendons in her neck pulled too tight, and she felt a wave of nausea rush through her. She shut her eyes and refused to look. Her stomach heaved and the muscle in her right cheek flexed painfully. It felt like her world had spun upside down. 

And then, her eyelids fluttered open, unable to resist, and she saw that she had been plunged back into black and white again.

Andy held her breath, not daring to make a move. One beat. Two. Fifteen. Twenty-one. 

Her world didn’t blink back to color like it usually did. The dulled grays were back in everything she saw. The fiery sun’s halo had disappeared.

_Quỳnh._

Andy let out a silent anguished cry into the bright afternoon. Her head was bowed, tears running down her cheek in streams and falling on the ground underneath her. 

Quỳnh was dead.

That was the only explanation. 

Her world was devoid of color. Her life, devoid of soul. 

She pushed her forehead down to touch the ground, and muttered Quỳnh’s name in reverence. The soft dirt pressed onto her skin. 

Quỳnh — her brown eyes a forest Andy walked for millennia, her heart strong enough to carry the sorrow of the world, her laugh that guided Andy home more often than not. She used to hear it ringing from the town square, as Quỳnh chased the little children down the street or gossiped with the women walking away from the stream. It was a loud laugh, free and hearty. Andy hadn’t heard that laugh for far too long, and yet she had been convinced that she would find her way to her love; that for all that this world had tried to tear them apart, they were meant to find their way back to their heart.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder. A corner of her mind recognized Nicky’s calluses. But it felt like another body, another life. Phantom.

She heard him say her name multiple times but she couldn’t find it in her to respond.

She was no longer Andy. Andy, who gave up. Andy, who lost and continued to lose.

She was also no longer Andromache, who dreamt of a long-haired warrior, and then came to live and die for the woman. She was no longer Anne, either, who traveled north in an attempt to be heroes and lost her love to the depths of waters unknown. 

She had no name. Not anymore. She was nameless, as she had been when she fell in gray, millennia ago, on a battlefield she still hadn’t found the courage to revisit. 

Her face tilted to look up at the white sun, bathing everything in colorless light, when, suddenly, her world kicked into color again. 

This time it was different. 

It was… everything she’d had _before_. When she could see the ochre of flowers around her, the maroon of her shirt, the singular black of her hair. The sun’s halo, _indrapaksha_ , was stunning but she could only see blue, green and red rings. The rest was a mystery, as it ought to be. 

She waited with bated breath, refusing to let herself make a sound. She focused on the world around her — lucid and within her grasp. 

Seconds and minutes passed. The colors did not fade, did not blink out. She could see the rolling green hills and brick rooftops of the town. Her eyes fixated on the blood red color of a rose bush to her right, each petal looking like a drop of blood drip-drip-dripping onto the dirt floor. 

“Quỳnh,” Andy finally gets out in a breathless and hoarse voice. “Quỳnh. My soul, Quỳnh.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Cosmic Love by Florence + The Machine.
> 
> Mini playlist: Weary by Solange, Color Song by Maggie Rogers, The Fear Of Letting Go by Ruelle, and Cosmic Love by Florence + The Machine.
> 
> Also, I had no idea there were so many different names for so many different colors! Learned a bunch of new words lol.
> 
> Tiny side note: Indrapaksha is a name for solar halos in Nepal. I used this because 1) I figured Andy had been to so many different places and cultures at so many different times, she probably forgot/is not aware of where certain cultures and languages geographically start/end after a point in time; and 2) I tried to find the Assamese name for it because I wanted to use both but I couldn’t. 
> 
> A fun fact about solar halos: They usually show up before it’s about to rain. Make of that what you will.
> 
> After reading many of the posts on tumblr that point out some inaccuracies in Andy’s backstory, I made a few tweaks to canon (pulled from various sources and with my own creative liberties). In this story, Andy’s first death is at ~1500 B.C.E (making her like 3500 years old) and Quynh’s first death is at ~500 B.C.E. I hope this makes sense? I’m not an expert in history and my sources are Wikipedia and the references at the bottom of a Wikipedia page. Please let me know if something sounds offensive or really wrong! Neither would be my intention with this story. Thanks for reading :)
> 
> **[Edit: I changed a sentence that implied that Joe & Nicky rescued Andy from the dungeons in England. After rewatching the movie, I noticed that Andy had escaped on her own.]**


End file.
